The importance of Life Cycle Assessment

An interview with LCE - partner of the EFFECTIVE project

 

Interviewees: Francesca Klack and Riccardo Novelli - LCE Sustainability Experts

1. How would you describe LCE’s mission and what is your role in project EFFECTIVE?
The mission of Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) is to support companies and organisations in improving and communicating their environmental, social and economic sustainability. From the early nineties, our core business has been to provide highly qualified consultancy services, through our interdisciplinary team consisting of experienced engineers, environmental scientists, architects, chemists and biologists.
LCE is a Partner of EFFECTIVE with the aim of developing the eco-design measures for carpet, garment solutions and packaging film as well as evaluating the overall sustainability performance of the new biobased materials realized in this project through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Social LCA (S-LCA).


2. What is the role of LCA and why it is important for the development of circular biobased industries?
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a holistic tool able to identify, qualify and quantify significant environmental aspects along the entire life cycle of the biobased product according to ISO 14040/44.
LCA is crucial because it allows the biobased industries to compare solutions at different development/maturity levels and/or with different scales of production, to identify which phases are the main contributors to the overall impact and to make an environmental trade-off. LCA is the most accredited tool by the European Commission to carry out the environmental performance analysis of the innovative products reducing the risk of greenwashing.

 

3. Where do you see the largest potential of circular biobased materials? 
The Covid era has shown that raw material shortage can threaten the EU area economy and it is necessary to diversify the sources. The circularity of biobased materials is one of the most helpful solutions to be acted. In particular, EFFECTIVE aims at the valorization of innovative low input industrial oil crops in marginal lands (e.g. cardoon) as well as byproducts or waste of industrial process, in high-value added biodegradable products. EFFECTIVE is a great opportunity to valorise raw material currently not exploitable interconnecting the agri-food, bioplastic and farming industries following a bioeconomy circular model.

 

4. How can we better address the environmental and social impacts of biobased goods?

The environmental and social performances of biobased goods should be proven starting from the sustainability of the feedstock, preserving the soil fertility, the biodiversity, the fertilizers dispersion as well as reducing the water stress. Besides the good and responsible choice of the feedstock there is the energy effectiveness, through the steam recovery or the exploitation of the process residues to produce energy wares. For this reason, EFFECTIVE can be a good opportunity to test the industrial symbiosis with the aim of exploiting the resources with high value avoiding disposal or downcycling. 

Finally, the Eco-design approach adopted by the EFFECTIVE consortium is based on gathering a complete understanding of the reference products, by extending the study to its entire life cycle and value-chain. The aim is to design a regenerative system in which resource input and waste, emissions, and energy losses are minimized by slowing, closing and narrowing material and energy loops. The focus moves from a product-oriented approach to an approach centered on the social and environmental network in which the product is conceived.

 

5. What would you like to achieve through project EFFECTIVE?
What we have seen so far is that when the efforts and the goals are shared, ambitious results are just around the corner. For this reason, LCE is confident to achieve the goals set by the consortium. Moreover, the EFFECTIVE project could inspire other biobased and circular business model in order to mitigate the environmental burden of different industrial sectors, moving away from a deep fossil-based material dependency, switching to renewable material sources.

This site uses cookies for better performance and user experience. Do you agree to use of cookies?

Find out more

Cookies on our web page

What is Cookie?

A cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browse while a user is browsing a website. When the user browses the same website in the future, the data stored in the cookie can be retrieved by the website to notify the website of the user's previous activity

How do we use cookies?

A visit to a this page could generate the following types of cookie.

Strictly necessary cookies

These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies services you have asked for, like shopping baskets or e-billing, cannot be provided.

2. Performance cookies

These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how a website works.

3. Functionality cookies

These cookies allow the website to remember choices you make (such as your user name, language or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. For instance, a website may be able to provide you with local weather reports or traffic news by storing in a cookie the region in which you are currently located. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages that you can customise. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.

4. Targeting and advertising cookies

These cookies are used to deliver adverts more relevant to you and your interests They are also used to limit
the number of times you see an advertisement as well as help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. They are usually placed by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. They remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organisations such as advertisers. Quite often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organisation.

Cookie management

Cookies can be managed via the web browser settings. Please, see you browser help how to manage cookies.

On this site you can always turn cookies on/off on menu item “Cookie Management”.

Website management

This website is managed by:

Circular Change, Institute for Circular Economy